Sylvia's Journal

We watched the stuff being loaded and unloaded along the creek on or from gigantic and rickety looking dhows, some with their center of gravity precariously high. We hope they either unload or don’t encounter rough seas. We surprised the Iranian crew of one of the dhows by addressing them in our halting Farsi once we knew their nationality.

We marveled at the mild weather of Dubai. It reminded me of the temperatures of my childhood summers in Holland, a pleasant 70 degrees. This was definitely a whole lot better than the 110 degrees during our July visit which made walking around an act of insanity.

We ate fried shrimp and fish in a small outdoor cafe along the creek, enjoying our first seafood in months, and sipped our fresh mango and coconut juices. Today was truly a first day of vacation.

We’ll treat ourselves to a nice dinner before heading to the airport to settle into our cramped quarters in the back of the plane for our 16 hour flight to Atlanta.

I am biding my time at Terminal 2 of Dubai’s airport. In back of me a group of men is sitting, spellbound, around a dark skinned bearded gentleman who is giving the equivalent of a Bible lesson. One of his 10 disciples is asleep but the others are eagerly listening. There is talk about dark and light stones, and a ring that protects travelers to ‘strange’ places. They are, I presume, on their way to Mecca.

The teacher speaks without taking a break for the entire time I am waiting to board (about 2 hours). He admits not to know Arabic, but speaks nevertheless in a mixture of English and Arabic . I can follow his lecture fairly well. It is part history lesson, part religious class and part storytelling, mysterious, miraculous and always about the truth. Sometimes he is deadly serious, sometimes laughing and always the ultimate authority on whatever he says. No one contradicts or questions him.

I learn that angels always obey and that one should have a little water and a small breakfast – nothing like what they serve at the Meridien hotel – before doing whatever they are going to do. He likens it to being like a sick child. There is much about ritual, purification and absolute belief, not requiring proof, just faith. One of the young men is particularly eager and engaged and receives special recognition from the teacher (you are a strong one!). He grins and bends forward even more, showing off what he knows.

Later he changes from teaching to self disclosure and telling his life story. He loses nearly half of his disciples but it is infinitely more interesting than his lecturing. The man is a book to be written. I learn that he is from Trinidad, and only a recent Moslem, more Moslem than Moslems, a converted Catholic. He tells about a friend he hung out with, a pot smoker, at the time of Woodstock (no signs of recognition on the face of his young followers – they have no idea). The friend, uninsured, got throat cancer and died despite his family spending 200.000 dollars on treatment. Ever the religious teacher he stresses the moral of that story: security can only be gotten from God, not from health insurance, money or the police. He is free-associating – the word police triggers a memory of his being arrested in Egypt by the secret police who followed him to mosques, thinking he was a Southern Sudanese (he could have been) planning some fundamentalist mischief.

I tire from listening to him and get myself a cup of freshly squeezed pomegranate juice for what might be a day’s wages or more for a Bangladeshi construction worker. I top it off with a macchiato from a Starbuck’s wannabe, making it two days of earnings for the said worker.

Most of the women waiting to board planes are clad in black formless gowns although a few have adorned their gown with colorful enhancements, like embroidered geometric shapes in bright colors or pastel ribbons. If they are not busy with looking after small children they are reading their holy books or staring into space. Several of the women, mostly the older ones but a few young ones as well, wear a burnished copper contraption on their head that covers their cheeks and eyebrows. I can’t see a purpose for it other than making it impossible to slap them in the face. I would love to sit with one of them and ask them a thousand questions but I don’t have the guts (and probably miss the language skills as well).

The longest part of the trip is now behind me. I had a good night sleep in Dubai. Arriving in (or departing from) Dubai is starting to get familiar: this is my 7th stop in this city since November 2008. Still, it remains a strange place. Of all the places I have visited in my life this one has the most white SUVs per square inch. It also has the most spotless white-clad men I have ever seen; I have always wondered whether their secret is simply changing clothes a lot. Women, in their black dresses, are at an advantage, for once.

The flight from Amsterdam was full of business men, some with their wives, from all over western Europe, not just Dutch. Apparently Dubai’s economy has not collapsed. It is also a tourist attraction – why is a mystery – and a party place. A group of young women with T-shirts that said something about a ‘hen party’ for someone named Fi on their chests and backs, spent a long time at the cash machine in Dubai’s arrival hall. I guess they plan to have fun and can afford it.

Despite the full flight I was lucky that the seat beside me remained empty. I was so tired that I had fantasies of spreading out on the ground or doubling over on the two seats but in the end managed to sleep, fitfully, in my seat between meal services.

I was greeted outside my hotel as if I was royalty, and then escorted to my room. Check in was done unobtrusively, as if there was no money involved in this transaction (which of course there is, lots of it). The room had a basket of fruit waiting for me as well as an espresso machine and a shower with water coming at you from every direction (this required a sharp mind to understand).

There was too much stuff to explore in this executive suite that I am upgraded to, that I stayed up longer than was good for me. It was such a shame to go straight to bed and not enjoy, even for a brief moment, these luxuries that stand in such sharp contrast to what awaits me in Kabul.

This morning’s breakfast buffet was a multicultural one: French, Korean, Indonesian, Arabic and then the usual stuff. I went for Arabic: various cheeses with olives, hummus. It was just the breakfast we had talked about during our Saudi dinner in Cambridge, last Monday, now worlds away. And now on to Kabul. 

As it turned out several hundred people decided to fly to Dubai from Bangkok in the middle of the night – not one seat was empty, despite the fact that one hour later another 777 was leaving for the same destination.

Landing in Dubai is delayed. We have to make a big circle over the city when another airplane is not vacating the runway in time for us. A go-around in a 777 takes a lot longer than one in a Piper. The last minutes of long flights like this are already tedious and endless, and now the go-around extends the agony by some 15 minutes.

It’s a long walk from terminal 3 to terminal 1 but it feels good to stretch my legs. I pass several smoking lounges which look like holding pens with people crammed into small spaces that are opaque with smoke; if you enter in one of those places you will get first, second and third hand smoke all at once; as a passerby I get a few whiffs myself since not everyone smokes inside the pens. I am glad I abandoned the habit long ago.

And now I am in the KLM lounge waiting for the next leg of my trip and am treated to a Larry King interview with the ex-governor of Illinois who is still in la-la-land (“I hope to wake up one morning and everyone realizes it was one big misunderstanding.”)

This is the schizophrenia of my life when traveling: from the poverty of Cambodia to the obscene luxury at Dubai airport where all the information counters are about ‘enhancing your shopping experience,’ rather than telling you where you can get your next boarding pass; from the warm fuzzy feeling that comes from working with people who fight against poverty to the disgust of seeing or hearing about people whose brittle egos need power or money or both.

I am told the flight is not full. I asked for an empty seat next to me but that has never worked and so I prepare for the worst.

I was given a tri-fold on expensive paper and with a fancy design that did not quite work. It looked more like a computer punch card. Of course the person who designed this card was probably born long after punch cards disappeared. I was asked to answer the questions and tell the marketing department about the quality of my very short stay in the hotel. It included items such as ‘How would you describe your experience in the elevator while going to your hotel room?’ with two blank lines for my concise answer. I was also asked whether I had noticed a change in the lobby environment between night and day and what my impression was of the scent in the entrance. Nothing was left out, even the art on the room key was pointed out to me; what was my impression? The whole thing was about how the hotel had affected my senses. Business schools and sales gurus have been telling us for years that selling services was all about ‘the experience’ that a company triggers in its customers. It finally trickled down into the evaluation forms (no longer called evaluation forms but comment cards.)

At midnight I was zipped to the airport in a chauffeured limo with the young desk clerk accompanying me in the passenger seat and me sitting in the back. That deserved a big tip of course which comes in handy with the Eid holiday I am sure.

Unlike Terminal 3, the departure hall for all the non-Emirate long haul flights was filled with people, albeit it mostly non-Moslems I suspect. The Moslem world, at least those who can afford to, is staying put and celebrating, especially that late into the night. The flight departed at 2 AM.

Although the plane was not as empty as my flight from Dhaka I did not need to share my row of three seats with anyone else so I stretched out and slept the entire trip (6 hours), waking up somewhere over Eastern Holland when breakfast was served.

One row in back of me were the two Dutch participants who I had met during the conference and who had disappeared on the last day. As it turned out they had, with other visitors from their project, driven all the way to Chittagong, a journey of several thousand kilometers.

Their project trains traditional village doctors in recognizing signs of mental illness and they visited a few en route and opened a training center. She wore two shiny pretend (she hoped) gold bangles that were pressed on to her friends after she had admired them on a newlywed’s arm. She was still annoyed with herself to have made such a stupid remark. You have to watch out what you admire. I think I have made that mistake a few times as well and ended up with stuff I actually did not really like. It is of course a trap set by being dishonest.

And now, onwards to home.

I drove to the airport with Lakshmi whose inspired talk about microfinance and health had moved me. We had one last chance to talk about her work and what she was taking back from the conference. She was in the first cohort of students produced by the James P. Grant School of Public Health and is like a calling card for the school. If that is what they produce, then it seems like a good choice if you want to learn about public health leadership – a perfect continuation of the work of the person the school is named after.

At the airport I found out that our plane was two hours late. Grameen has installed free internet kiosks in the departure area for travelers. This helped to kill time. I struck up a conversation with Thierry who sounded like an Englishman but was actually French and an owner of a garment factory that produces high end men’s slacks. I am invited to visit the factory next time I make it to Bangladesh. In return I invited him to the US to find out that Dallas and Hawaii, the only places he knows, are not that representative of the United States. By the time we left we had become good friends and I knew all about his family.

The plane was nearly empty because of Eid el Adha, the big Moslem holiday that commemorates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son as an act of obedience to God. Everyone who returned to his or her family for the festivities had already done so; it’s not like Thanksgiving with much last minute travel. In Dubai people have been holidaying since December 2, when I passed through on my way to Dhaka. Then it was the UAE’s national holiday. Work here will not resume until the 14th, which makes this a 12-day holiday; a good time to travel through here.

On the plane from Dhaka to Dubai I sat next to a family of 5 from Myanmar that was part of a group of 7 other families being resettled from a refugee camp in Bangladesh where they had lived for the last 17 years. The father’s English was good enough to make it possible to have a conversation. I had so many questions. All the fathers in the group carried a large plastic bag that had IOM (International Organization for Migration) stamped on it in three languages. Presumably it contained their migration papers and what looked like X-rays, I suppose to show they are free of TB, much like what I remember carrying with me when I entered the USA as an immigrant, exactly 27 years ago.

The father had escaped as a 13 year old boy from Myanmar with his family in a boat and landed in one of the many refugee camps in Bangladesh – maybe the one where Sayeed’s company runs soap, biogas or other factories on behalf of various agencies that serve the enormous refugee population, camps holding as many as 30.000 people. I asked him what life was like in the camp. He said it was boring as they were not allowed to work for an income, some inane rule that serves some purpose I cannot imagine. Sayeed had mentioned this too.

The families are being resettled in Manchester UK and he enthusiastically talked about Manchester United; needless to say, he was a big football (soccer) fan. Apparently that was one thing they did do in the camps. He also started learning English some 2 years ago, when his resettlement was decided. It took that long to get to this moment. He had clearly been prepared for the flight because he knew to ask for baby food, diapers, blankets, bottles, etc. He traveled with his wife and three children, a boy of 1 who looked like he was six months, a boy of 5 who looked like he was three and a girl of 8 who looked like she was five. “No more,” he said with a big grin, “family planning.” Sadly the grandparents were left behind in the camp. I have a feeling they’ll stay there until they die. I imagined the heart wrenching farewells.

Emirates takes good care of its smallest passengers. A flight attendant went around taking polaroid pictures of the children and their families. She also doled out many presents, coloring books, color pencils, adorable stuffed animal hand puppets and all sorts of goodies for the adults as well (toothpaste sets, razor sets, playing cards). The refugee family took everything with some reluctance and then wanted to return everything to the crew after we landed. In the end they left everything on their chairs when they exited the plane. I could not imagine why but maybe it is like too much food for someone who has been starving.

And then, shifting gears, I arrived back at the brand new Terminal 3 of Dubai airport that is made for the kind of traffic one expects for the Olympics. On the first day of Eid it was deserted with lots of bored people sitting at various help desks sending phone messages to, presumably, other bored people elsewhere in the terminal or city.

One is welcomed by two very odd life sized puppets of women that I cannot figure out. At first I thought they had large bandaids in front of their noses and mouths and it was some sort of advertisement. Upon closer examination these appeared to be the metal contraptions that some women wear. I remember seeing a few older women with these when I traveled through here a month ago. I wasn’t sure then and still are not sure exactly what the purpose is of those things, if not some sort of silencer of women’s voices; or is it to keep the sand from entering mouth or nose?

A short drive took me to the Meridien airport hotel in Dubai where I was upgraded to superdeluxe status with bowing people as if I was royalty: fruit platters, an enormous room and an entire espresso machine, invitations to free alcohol and finger foods later this afternoon (unless I want to have the 120 dollar late nigh bubbly dinner with unlimited drinks and fancy buffet – I declined). Instead I treated myself to a mini mezze, corona and umm ali desert while watching Al Gore updating his incovenient truth with the latest scientifc discoveries – in a constant repeating loop, I suppose to make sure I get the gloomy message and jump into action.